ROME — Boldness, courage, and a willingness to take risks are essential qualities of the Christian life, Pope Francis said in a video address Thursday evening.
Jesus invites Christians “to use their talents with courage,” the pope told participants in the Festival of the Social Doctrine of the Church in Verona, Italy.
“It does not matter how many or what one’s talents are,” he continued. “Jesus asks them to take risks and invest them in order to multiply them.”
“When we remain closed in on ourselves with the sole objective of preserving what exists, we are losers in the eyes of the Gospel: in fact, even what is left will be taken away,” he said. “Boldness, hope, creativity and courage are words that outline the spirituality of the Christian.”
Boldness and courage sum up “the attitude with which we have tried to face this time, which is still conditioned by the pandemic” because boldness “is necessary to be a Christian.”
I renew my invitation to walk in the hope that “is bold, can look beyond personal convenience, the petty securities and compensations which limit our horizon, and can open us up to grand ideals which make life more beautiful and worthwhile,” he said.
Recent studies suggest that one of the gravest dangers facing young generations is that of passivity and risk-aversion, a phenomenon exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“God’s very first commandment to human beings was a response to the risk of inertness and passivity: ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’” wrote Yuval Levin earlier this month, in response to an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) study on the state of family formation in the wake of the pandemic.
The danger of disordered unruliness “has been joined by a more profound and fundamental problem that might be best described as a disordered passivity — a failure to launch, which leaves too many Americans on the sidelines of life, unwilling or unable to jump in,” Levin proposed.
“Social inertness is surely a response in part to the breakdown of the traditional social order itself,” he suggested. “The waning of the life scripts provided by family, religion, and widespread traditional social norms leaves younger Americans less sure of where to step and how to build their lives.”
This lack of drive and healthy ambition, fueled by a loss of a sense of one’s place in the world, has grown more acute during the helpless months of inaction imposed by the pandemic, as people have increasingly sought security over freedom, passive dependency over active agency.
What we see before us, Levin asserted, is “a rising generation acutely averse to risk, and so to every form of dynamism.”
“Excessive risk aversion now often deforms parenting, education, work, leadership, and fellowship in our society,” he declared. “It is intertwined with a more general tendency toward inhibition and constriction — with Americans walking on eggshells around each other in many of our major institutions, and with codes of speech and conduct becoming increasingly prevalent.”
All of this suggests that Pope Francis’ call for “boldness” and openness to “risk” is as timely as it has ever been.
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